Chagal4's Blog

So while we’re on the topic of music I’ll just cut in here with Willy Deville. I don’t remember when I first heard Willy but it was quite a while ago. I have always loved lounge lizard bands. Most of them never amount to much but they play their hearts out in smokey rooms that smell like stale beer and bad dreams. They often play to ten drunks nodding into their chests in a  personal dance with secret steps learned years ago. Mink Deville was a few miles higher than that and Willy was some kind of cool dude that couldn’t be reached by any earthly means. To say that Willy was as fucked up as a road killed snake would be stating the obvious…but it was also irrelevent…irrelevent then and irrelevent now. Listen to Willy singing the acoustic version of “You Better Move On” and you should feel moved to burn half of your more recent CDs.I know there are and have been hundreds of singers and thousands of songs over the decades of radio and recording. Everyone has a favourite or two or more. I have many favourites. I grew up within hearing distance of Motown and I remember Stevie Wonder when he was “Little Stevie Wonder” playing “Fingertips” on a wailing harmonica. I remember Willie Nelson when he wore a suit . Music has been the sound track of my life and it has carried me through the forest of foolishness and the valley of tears. It has raised me from the fiercest funks and walked down paths of broken glass as I laboured in the paper mills of bureaucracy. Waiting for surgery recently I had a night or two of quiet despair. Dark wings seemed to be beating the air over head and I was sweating raindrops in my bed. I could have listened to anyone then…and as a mini detour here…I suddenly realized the genius of all those Gideon’s Bibles in cheap hotel rooms waiting for the right moment . Well it happened that I pulled the ear phones on and found Willy Deville telling me I better move on…and I was hooked. When I read somewhere that someone said that so and so had changed their lives…Elvis or Bob Dylan or  Aerosmith or John Lennon I never sneer. Inspiration is where you find it. I watched my best pal, stoned on acid, spend two hours staring into the threads of a tattered cat stained carpet declaring it was a universe of beauty that breathed and moved in a a magical rythmn. Well hell yes. All I know is that there was passion, emotion and a sense of something timeless in that voice…Willy Deville . R.I.P. Thanks dude…that night you chased away the demons, got me on my feet and slowing dancing with secret steps learned long ago.

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